On 08.06.2010, at 11:00, E. Kaplan wrote: > Thanks, Daniel, for sharing this solution.
> Which style file are we talking about? The beamer theme I have developed for my department. Its a complete own theme that is included with \usetheme{i4} in your preamble and has to be put somewhere in your texmf-tree (or side by side to the presentation). I have zipped it together with a small example: http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~lohmann/download/i4beamer.zip As a (somewhat bigger) example I have also provided the Puma-Talk: http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~lohmann/download/puma-slides.zip Here I have put the style side by side to the presentation, as I was collaborating with a colleague on that. DISCLAIMER: As most of my talks, this one went through some "last-minute optimization" that partly lead to, well, not so nice code. > Since examples are the best teachers, could you please upload (or point to) a > Lyx file to produce (part of?) the very nice presentation of PUMA that was > showcased on your last message? Sorry, there is no LyX file. I considered the discussion to be already at a point how to achieve such things with beamer at all. I personally do not consider LyX to be the right front end for beamer. In my presentations, I tend to use a lot of visual effects and as little "plain text" as possible. The visual effects are mostly achieved with TikZ and some LaTeX (and sometimes even plain TeX) coding, which means that within LyX I would end up with 80% ERT, which would be a PITA. LyX is definitely not my editor of choice for LaTeX code. Even though I never have tried it: the theme should be usable together with LyX as good (or as bad) as any Beamer theme, so feel free to experiment with it. On 08.06.2010, at 20:29, Steve Litt wrote: > Daniel, your solution inspired me to solve the other Beamer problem I'd been > having. I enjoy having text blocks in my presentations where the text block > is > maybe 60% of the width, and centered. The width of a Beamer block can be > altered by a \setlength{\textwidth}, but no matter what I did with \center, > \centering, \hskip, \leftskip, I couldn't center it. Yeah, this LaTeX center commands are all a bit strange wrt when they work and when not; I have never really understood it. The one that works for me is the center *environment*. I usually combine it with minipages to achieve the desired text width: \begin{center}\begin{minipage}{0.8\textwidth} < BLOCK > \end{minipage}\end{center} > Ehud and Daniel, what other Beamer difficulties can you think of? I'm having > a > lot of trouble getting onto the Beamer-Latex mailing list, so this is the > most > authoritative Beamer knowledge source I have. There is probably plenty to say that (even more probably) I have forgot meanwhile. So, to just get this started: ** absolute positioning of elements. IMHO an essential for presentation slides, but not "natively" supported by beamer. I ended up with using TikZ pictures with the [overlay] option and the (current page) node to achieve this (see the puma-slides example). In fact, TikZ has come to my rescue in many more cases, so I use it quite a lot in conjunction with beamer. A major downside of employing TikZ quite a lot, is, however... ** long compilation times. I use the comment package (\begin{comment} ... \end{comment} to uncomment during authoring those parts of a presentation I am currently not working on. ** reusability of frames. This is an issue I do not yet have found a good solution for. In theory, beamer frames should be simply reusable, that is, just copy the \begin{frame} ... \end{frame} block into your new presentation -- right? In practice, this only works for the most trivial slides. LaTeX is all about easing your life with macros, packages, styles, and so on and I use all of it quite a lot. The downside is that after a while it is no longer obvious on which packages, listing-styles, tikz-styles, color definitions, custom macros, and so on -- all that stuff one usually puts (or has to put) in the preamble -- a certain frame depends. Things become even worse in a collaborative environment, where each of your colleagues has her own tool kit in this respect. An attempt to reuse just three slides from a colleague in one of my lectures turned out to be multi-hour project, because of such subtle dependencies, especially those that do not show up at compilation time, but just make the result looking weird, are hard to debug. Daniel